As of 22 November, ANIMUS is published and available in kindle and paperback editions.

So what was the inspiration behind this collection?

That came in two parts, one more welcome than the other…

Firstly, I wanted the freedom to write a genre-roaming range of otherwise disparate stories, unified only by the presence in each of an object – something that might plausibly pass from hand to hand and participate in noteworthy moments throughout the 20th Century and beyond.

Of course, you could argue that anything can become a personal talisman. But I reasoned that certain objects, making their appearance at times of heightened emotions, take on a power that reaches beyond the purely symbolic. One might almost say that they become vessels. A wedding ring, for instance: loaded with hopes, fears, potential deceits and inescapable regrets.

Since I knew that some of the tales I wanted to write were likely to be detective stories, others more in the espionage/political thriller arena – and others perhaps grappling for something less genre-restricted to say about crime and punishment, war and peace (!) –  a pistol seemed a promising choice.

Dramatically, after all – and as a certain other Russian said – a gun is a promise to the audience. Plus, in the quest for dramatically diverse scenarios, it's handy in that it can readily span good or bad intentions and characters, as well as different countries, cultures, even centuries. (The Walther PPK, for example, is not only still wielded on page and screen by Britain’s best-loved secret agent but was also the weapon – reputedly – with which Hitler took his own life.)

But I didn’t want something so (in)famous. Nor simply to feature a particular model of handgun. Rather, it seemed important that it was literally the same artefact in each story: the only recurring character.

So I chose this old Soviet service pistol, the Tula Tokarev.

Or, yes, perhaps it chose me...

Because that’s when the less-welcome inspiration started creeping its way in. It was impossible to pick up the gun – loaded with history as well as dramatic possibilities – without thinking about the scenarios in which it had found itself and the deeds it had done. They were still there, echoing through each crude milling mark and blood-pitted blemish, every worn-smooth striation in the cracked Bakelite, every lingering odour and clinging residue.

It had a particular resonance, and I listened to it.

(Note to myself: next time, or rather, in an alternative time line, if you’re going to explore the idea that certain inanimate objects can not only embody their users’ intent but also somehow materialise a spirit – an animus – and even retain memories... maybe don’t make it an object made for murder!)

Anyway, the stories came to me, one way or another. And as they did, my attempts to track the exact same gun through history fell apart. Narrative requirements began to trump archaeological intent. If I was to tell its stories, the timeline required it to have had different owners at the same point and to have been in two places at once.  Or was it playing with me?

No matter, I thought. It’s only a loose theme designed to animate a free-ranging collection, not the defining structure of a novel. So I let the stories take their own paths, for now.

I say ‘for now’ because I suspect that some day, they will all converge again.

No, I can’t say when yet, or how. It’s just a feeling.

You could say that something’s telling me.

          *          *          *          *          *          * ​

Anyway, long story short... here's how the individual stories got started:

Targets
Blokhin was real, an extraordinary monster. Perversely, his tally of 7,000 murders in 28 days during the Katyn massacre even got him into the Guinness World Records as ‘most prolific executioner’. When I read about him I found myself wishing I could send someone after him – an ordinary monster. So I did.
                               
Kom-bat
FlashBack Fiction was (and hopefully will be again) a beautifully edited online journal that enabled someone like me to explore the short form's ability to re-inhabit moments from history. This, the only real example of flash in the volume, was written for that journal and benefitted greatly from the input of one of its editors. The website is still up and I urge everyone to explore it. You can even hear me reading the audio version of this story (cringe!)

Shooter
My uncle was BAFTA-nominated for the screenplay he wrote for a movie, Yield to the Night, that helped turn public opinion against capital punishment back in the late 1950s. This story was at least partly inspired by his work on that movie, as well as by memories of Camden Town from my childhood.
                              
Kosmos 57  
A locked room murder mystery set in a one-man space capsule… could it be done? As is often the case, the ‘parlour game’ aspect was just the starting point – and this one certainly broadened its horizons.
                                
The Illusionist  
I used to work on a barge on the Regent’s Canal in Shoreditch. I’d walk there every day up the City Road and turn right at the Eagle. Sometimes I’d pop in and out… and it was in there one day that I came up with this idea for a story set at a very different junction, where the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of the magic and secret worlds converge.
                           
The Liberation of Vaclav Voracek   
Another story with a personal connection, which I’ve mentioned before here. When the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and brought a shocking end to the ‘Prague Spring’, friends of our family were shooting a Hollywood movie in the country and had to get back across the newly reinstated Iron Curtain. But I always wondered about the Czech students on the crew who had no means of escape. Although it's set in an unnamed country, this story is for them.

Stockholm
Inspired by some of those controversial psychology experiments that were conducted in the 1960s and 70s – the Stanford Prison Experiment being an infamous example – and by cases such as that of Patty Hearst, who was endlessly debated as I was growing up, this story is itself a study: what is the passive voice really hiding?
                                   
Animus 
The title story is very much my reaction to the let-down of 'Cool Britannia', New Labour and the supposed victory of Western liberal values… seen through the eyes of a compromised private investigator who has spent even more time in the pub than I did.
                              
Departures  
Two people, a man and woman, sit and talk about something offstage. Yeah, Hemingway did it with Hills Like White Elephants, to which this is a bit of a homage. But it also demonstrates how, if you have a particular theme to a collection of stories and there’s a story in which the theme hasn’t yet revealed itself, and it’s the last story… a certain, inevitable tension builds – and, like Hemingway but in a different way, you don’t have to show or tell it.)

           

Saturday 30th August sees the publication of THE SAFEHAVEN COMPLEX, which completes the CHASING MERCURY trilogy.

It’s been quite a journey, for me as well as Mila and Bradley. Not least because what was originally meant to be a full-on commercial undertaking has ended up becoming (with the exception of the consideration given so generously by beta/advance readers) the ultimate indie effort. A one-man-show. Pulled together on the thinnest of shoestrings. For love, or pride, or whatever you call it when it sure as hell ain’t going to pay the mortgage.

If you’ve read Book One, THE BORODINO SACRIFICE, you know where Mila and Bradley’s journey began. But what about mine?

Well, I don’t come from the secret world. (Although I would say that, wouldn’t I?) And while these stories have inspirations that are very personal to me – yes, from Uncle John’s tales of working with both ‘Lucky’ Luciano and SOE's Vera Atkins to my own experiences in the Czech Republic and my mother’s with the Springbok Legion/Torch Commando – they are first and foremost works of invention, drawing speculative links between real events with the goal of entertainment not education. That goal came first; the personal stuff was fitted around it.

And yet. Here’s the thing…

I think any book can have or be a noble cause. Especially if it sprang from a desire to fill a gap – i.e., not to produce something that is just like something else but to create something that wasn’t there before. And not only in terms of plot but also execution. That’s why I used to struggle when pitching these books, particularly when it came to trotting out comparison titles and saying where they’d fit on the shelves.

Now, I’m not saying that such a mindset is in itself noble. (Commercially, it’s pretty stupid, for a start.) Nor am I claiming that my CHASING MERCURY books are mould-breakingly, trend-settingly unique. (In fact, to my mind, there are places where they become a little too imitative.) But I think they do come from an honest place, a place that I admire in many authors yet search for in vain with too many others.

So this, boiled down to its basics, is the true “origin story” of these stories: the moment when my juvenile impulse to be a writer grew into an adolescent (and therefore, of course, lifelong) desire to produce plot-AND-character-led thrillers that I couldn’t find on the shelves.

It’s the moment when I began venturing beyond the young adult section of the local library and encountered the paperbacks at the second-hand bookstores. Those books. The ones in the boxes outside. The Fontana Alistair MacLeans and Desmond Bagleys and Helen MacInneses featuring photoshoots that looked like movie stills on the front. (Geoff Dyer, over to you…) The completely unrepresentative Modesty Blaise covers from Pan’s 1970s sexploitation fever-dream (even whilst, for Wilbur Smith, they managed to overdo the epic grandeur instead). The Bonds that you tried to collect with matching spines and art and never could...

Covers, and titles – before the days of algorithm-feeding tedium – on books that had a lot to live up to and didn’t always deliver on their promise.

But maybe I could.
​
          *          *          *          *          *          * 

​There you are. A great big, dirty, embarrassing ambition. Some would say laughably arrogant. Certainly naive. And, of course, one that was doomed to fail, by its very nature, as perhaps it had failed over the years for many of those authors in the 10p boxes out front. But an honest one. And that’s something.

And what of the journey now – for Mila and Bradley, and for me?

“Time will tell. It always does.”

Let’s get straight down to it. What’s a spy story?

And then what’s ‘spy adjacent’?
 
The latter is a term I’ve encountered in the always thought-provoking Spybrary facebook group, most recently in a debate about whether The Third Man is a spy story or not.
 
As I said, thought-provoking.
 
Let’s start another way...
 
What is a spy?
 
When I was a kid playing my Waddingtons board game Spy Ring, I thought it was obvious. A spy was someone in a hat and trench coat, collar turned up, lurking around near embassies (whatever they were) who felt a bit like the cartoon detective in The Pink Panther (some confusion creeping in there)…
 
…and what he wasn’t was a secret agent, who was someone who wore slick suits, used gadgets and drove cars that you could get Corgi models of – not only Bond’s DB5 but even The Man From Uncle’s ‘THRUSH-BUSTER’!! (Google it. Carefully.)
 
At which stage, if you’re like me, a couple of things probably happen next.
 
Maybe you’re caught spying on your sister or a neighbour sunbathing. Now you know what spying means – and the importance of avoiding counter-espionage measures.
 
Or, some smart-arse mocks you for getting MI5 and MI6 mixed up and you vow never to make the same mistake again, even if virtually everyone else does… I mean seriously, it’s like apostrophes!
 
Eventually, of course, you read le Carré and the like and you come to accept that an agent or a spy isn’t what you thought; that’s an agent runner or a case officer. Or maybe they’re assets handled by intelligence officers. And along the way you learn the difference between legals and illegals, espionage and counter espionage, and counter intelligence and… well, maybe that’s still a little confusing. Especially when you read Spycatcher and realise how much spying goes into countering it. Or anything about all the WWII agents being turned and run back as doubles.
 
The big takeaway, of course, as childhood absolutes start acquiring shades of grey, is that a spy is probably not a highly-trained, bikini-babe-bestrewn action hero and more likely someone who’s been manipulated into betraying secrets by an equally morally compromised handler. At least, that’s what the prevailing wind in fiction has been telling us ever since le Carré and Len Deighton punctured Fleming fever and reminded us about Graham Greene.
 
Which brings me back to The Third Man, for which Greene wrote the screenplay, and to that cursed term ‘spy adjacent’.
 
What does it mean?
 
On the face of it, it appears to signify a story which, whilst brushing past the world of spies and spying, is really focused on something else. Black Ops maybe. Or a love story. Or, as with The Third Man, crime.
 
But, I think, that word ‘Crime’ exemplifies the problem, especially with a capital letter. This isn’t really about understanding and redefining works of fiction for the purposes of literary or media studies. It’s about shoving them into genres for the sake of convenience. If it’s structured like a detective story, with a murder, an investigation, a revelation, a capture – and/or if it's rooted in the world of organised crime (both of which are true here) – it’s a crime story.  And if it’s on film, especially shadowy black & white with lots of hats and Dutch angles, it’s Noir.
 
So even if it feels like a spy story, sorry, it can’t be. It can only be ‘spy adjacent’.
 
Which in this particular case is fine, I guess. I mean, I might argue that a story set in the Inter-Allied Zone in post-war Vienna, in a milieu that’s so stuffed with spies and secrets that the policing has to be done by MPs who seem a lot more like military intelligence or counterintelligence officers... a story which features an antagonist who’s doing unspecified favours for the Soviets in return for safe haven in their zone and has a Russian ‘liaison officer’ plotting to forcibly repatriate a Czech émigré and presumably falsely accuse her of espionage… still feels kinda spy-ish. Not least because what it’s really about is betrayal, and that’s as spy-central as it gets. But OK, the main thrust of the story is about racketeering not politics and the main character does more investigating than actual infiltrating. It’s spy adjacent. Got it.
 
So what about The Odessa File and The Day of the Jackal? They’re political, and they feature operations to counter underground groups – the kind of thing MI5 and its pretty-spy-ish operatives would be getting involved in if they were set in Britain instead of France and Germany. Plus, with all their assumed identities, they feel like espionage thrillers, and one of them gave us a piece of tradecraft that is still shamelessly imitated to this day. Are they only spy adjacent too?
 
Seemingly so.
 
And seemingly, I would argue, because it’s an easy catch-all basket for anything which isn’t quite what you expect a spy story to be.
 
But hang on a moment. Not every spy story has to feature spies acquiring state secrets or spy-catchers catching moles or Jackson Lamb letting out another fart, does it? And I’m not talking arty-farty genre-crossing either. I mean… Thunderball! By which I mean many other Bond stories too, of course, and much besides. SPECTRE doesn’t really seem to do much Counter-intelligence, Terrorism or Revenge when it comes down to it. It’s all about the Extortion. It’s a racket, like Harry Lime’s black market penicillin. So does that make it spy adjacent?
 
Or take another example. The much-adored spy thriller The Night Manager. The antagonist is an arms dealer, a racketeer. And the protagonist, although recruited and prepped by the spooks in classic le Carré style, is a civilian who has blundered into this world and is motivated by personal feelings, just like The Third Man’s Holly Martins. So is this to be rebranded ‘spy adjacent’? OK, it has some Bond-esque ‘undercover’ behaviour and some Bond-esque locations to make it feel less like a crime or revenge thriller – but then, in the TV version, it also presents us with a glimpsed shopping list of the latest British weapons that puts it firmly in the realm of outright comedy (Vulcan bombers and Trident submarines for crowd control, I seem to recall…) 
 
The fact of the matter, surely, is that much of what we call spy stuff is more like the above. As the Cold War developed (or didn’t) and then ended (or didn’t), we tired of faceless KGB apparatchiks (erm, yeah...) and demanded a more varied cast of baddies, which of necessity brought in colourful criminals of all kinds – often linked to espionage, sometimes not, but rarely perceived as just being (ho-hum) adjacent.

And I’m thinking, too, (because I usually do) of Modesty Blaise. She was frequently touted as ‘the female James Bond’ and referred to as a glamorous spy or secret agent, presumably because she was recruited by British Intelligence. But look at those jobs she was recruited for, or accidentally fell into in later stories. Almost invariably they involved drawing on her criminal background to take on some of that colourful cast of criminal baddies, and often by confronting rather than spying on them. Doesn’t that make her at best spy adjacent?
 
Because I’m coming to the point at last. Modesty was a large part of the inspiration behind my ‘Chasing Mercury’ series, even though they’re set more in The Third Man’s milieu.
 
I confidently decided that the first book, The Borodino Sacrifice, was a historical spy/action thriller. It features a rogue wartime secret agent and an ex-soldier recruited by British Intelligence to track her down in the ruins of post-war Europe, as the Iron Curtain descends with all the political intrigues that entails. The antagonists are renegade Nazis and several competing Soviet intelligence and counter-espionage agencies, including SMERSh. So spy, yes, not adjacent?
 
Then the sequel, The Herrenhaus Forfeit, which launches at the end of August. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a continuation of the first book, as well as a standalone adventure in its own right. But for this novel I’ve changed things up. This time the main antagonists are either British gangsters who’ve infiltrated the occupation forces in Germany (there’s a big heist at the centre of the narrative) or nefarious shadow-state organisations smuggling weapons and refugees. So can I carry on calling it spy, or is it – despite the continued reliance on subterfuge, infiltration and cover stories – shuffling towards spy adjacency?
 
See my point?
 
And what’s really silly (and has prompted this outburst) is that while plotting the third book, The Safehaven Complex, I’m currently losing sleep about whether or not to nudge it back closer to pure-blood spy – at least partly in deference to the non-existent sanctity of non-existent divisional boundaries in a non-binding genre we all know is largely fictional anyway!
 
Right. Better get on with it…


THE BORODINO SACRIFICE is available on Amazon. I am seeking ARC readers for THE HERRENHAUS FORFEIT, so if you'd like a free copy (no obligation to review) get in touch.
​

I touched on this (pardon the pun) in my post about getting iconic weapons wrong... Sometimes the difference between seeing something in a book/online and physically getting hold of it (or having a ride in it, or using it, or going to the actual location or whatever) isn't just the obvious sensory authenticity with which you can now layer your writing. Sometimes it's so surprising it sparks a whole fresh idea.

Take the 2-Franc coin on the left, dated 1943. I just pulled it and its 1945 sister out of a childhood coin collection in an old cigar box in the garage – almost by chance but also because I was curious about the differing designs.  You see, one was minted during the German occupation and the other after Liberation.

In many ways, 1943 was the worst of times. By then, the Nazis had finally occupied all of France and the oppressive reality of that was even reflected in the coinage. In place of the personification of Liberty and the Republic, you got an axe, a couple of sheaves and FRENCH STATE. Instead of Equality and Fraternity... WORK, and FAMILY (as in 'you wouldn't want anything to happen to yours.'). Not to mention what the coins are made of – scrap aluminium. They weigh almost nothing.

And that's what got me thinking. Idly, I tossed one – and failed to catch it. Whether because of muscle memory or a light breeze, I found it surprisingly hard to do, because of the coin's uncanny lack of mass. So imagine a Special Operations Executive agent sent to work with the French resistance, unfamiliar with the latest coinage. They have to decide between two targets to sabotage, they flip a coin and...

I dunno. As I've said before, I don't write about F-Section; I let others do that. But it's either a nice little tactile detail or, potentially, some kind of initiating incident. And I wouldn't even have thought of it if I hadn't picked up the coin, that's my point.

Anyway, you can have that. Maybe someone can do something with it.

Vive la France!

​Imagine you’re a Czech dissident or anti-communist – or just a believer in democracy, or even just an intellectual. Maybe you fought on the “wrong” side during the war (still against the Nazis, but with the Czech army-in-exile in the west instead of the communist-sponsored partisans in the east). Or maybe you just have a big house with some nice things in it. The problem for you is that it’s February 1948 and the communists have seized control of Czechoslovakia in a coup d’état. You’re going to be on their list. You don’t know what to do.
 
Then you’re introduced by a friend of a friend to a young woman who says she can help. Her name is Milena Markova, but maybe she calls herself Vanda Roubalova, or even (with encouraging resonances of old wartime resistance code-names) “Kolda”. She tells you she has contacts in the west, with the American intelligence services, and if you’re important enough, she might even confirm that yes, the dreaded Statni Bezpecnost or StB has its eye on you.

So you liquidate your assets, gather together your loved ones, and arrange to meet her in the woods one night, near the German border. There you are passed to people smugglers or corrupt border guards who sneak you over a very convincing border to a US Army post, where you are welcomed by a member of the US Counter Intelligence Corps. And of course, during this interview, you are asked who told you about Milena Markova, and what other networks of dissatisfied Czechs you have heard about – after all, maybe you can help them escape too... You’re offered Lucky Strikes to smoke and American whisky to drink. Maybe you toast the portrait of President Truman that hangs on the wall.
 
Then, having signed your statement, one of two things happens. Either you are sent on your own, carrying your signed confession, to another US Army post a little further through the darkened woods – and in this case, perhaps because you misunderstood the instructions and inadvertently wandered back across the border, you are caught red-handed by Czechoslovak border guards. Or, in the alternative scenario, the American officer’s welcoming manner hardens suddenly; he tells you that your application for asylum has been rejected and you are abruptly handed over to the Czech authorities (news of which perfidious western betrayal will filter back to the dissident underground on prison grapevines). Either way, you are arrested, stripped of your cash and valuables, put on trial and sentenced to hard labour or death, with your friends, family and helpers soon to follow.
 
You’ve been caught by an entrapment “combination” run by the Czechoslovak StB (State Security) named Operation KAMEN or “Border Stone”. As Igor Lukes puts it in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence (Volume 55, No.1), this was “a fiendishly clever scheme” involving false borders and border posts positioned well inside the actual border, fake German and American officers, and of course a network of agents provocateurs like Milena Markova. It was set in place as soon as the communists took power and continued running until the Americans, having learned the truth and issued formal protests that were mockingly dismissed, broadcast a public warning about the scheme on Radio Free Europe in 1951.
 
As with many spy stories, it’s easy to sympathise with the poor victims, yet still tempting to romanticise other aspects of the operation, and none more so than the role of the glamorous femme fatale. But let’s look at her. According to one of the officers involved in Operation Border Stone, Milena Markova was no willing participant. She had been blackmailed into working for the StB because of her dishonourable behaviour during the war, presumably dating Nazi occupiers; and eventually, having been used too many times to continue as an effective decoy duck, she was herself arrested and held in solitary confinement, where she committed suicide.
 
And that’s the point. At its heart, or in place of its heart, this “fiendish scheme” is another brutish tale. The StB were operating far beyond the law, sometimes gunning down escapers to satisfy personal grievances, always robbing them of their valuables along the way – and even targeting people not for ideological reasons but purely for the likely profit to be made.
 
Which, I think, is why we want spy fiction, in place of spy fact. Because even when we congratulate ourselves on preferring the supposedly de-romanticised stories, deep down we know we still like them fictionalised and dramatized. The alternative is too damn ugly.
 
Nor does it take much to imagine how versions of this scheme are being played out today.

 
I am indebted to the aforementioned piece “Ensnaring the Unwitting in Czechoslovakia – KAMEN: A Cold War Dangle Operation with an American Dimension, 1948–52” in Studies in Intelligence Vol. 55, No. 1 (Extracts, March 2011), as well as to the article “Refugee trap at the wrong border” by Tabea Rossol in Der Spiegel (November 1, 2013). The image depicts an actual StB agent, disguised as an American, interviewing the Czechoslovakian Jaroslav Hakr. (Photo: abscr.cz Archiv bezpecnostnich sluzeb, ABS H-253.)
 
My (very fictionalised) spy story The Borodino Sacrifice is available now on Amazon: mybook.to/Borodino
 
 

Launch day is upon us! (For the eBook anyway – thanks to my amazing forward-planning abilities, the paperback is following in a couple of days, on the 3rd of this month – oops!) The early reviews have been really encouraging (thank you all!) but I left it so late that I urgently need more of them if I'm going to stand a chance of standing out at all... 

So, please, check out your local Amazon page for THE BORODINO SACRIFICE at mybook.to/Borodino – and also sign up for the Chasing Mercury News & Stuff substack – come find me on X @paulphillips44 – and share, share, share!​

Here's Virginia McKenna as Special Operations Executive agent Violette Szabo, in that stiff-upper-lip classic Carve Her Name With Pride (a movie on which, as I've already mentioned, my Uncle John assisted in an uncredited capacity, alongside SOE's mysterious Vera Atkins and a couple of her surviving field agents).

The scene with poor injured Violette holding off the whole Das Reich Division was an inspiration to me from a young age, as it obviously was for the illustrators of the poster – and no, in the movie itself, as in real life, she didn't still have her parachute harness attached!

But what she did have, as you can see, was a Sten gun: the iconic epitome of Britain's unglamorous, utilitarian, egalitarian war effort. (Yes, I'm back on that again...)

Cut to the present. I'm reading a newish novel set in the world of the F-Section agents and thinking it a pretty good twist on a familiar subject, actually. But one thing keeps jarring – the description of the Sten gun as an American weapon.

I know. Yawn. Mansplaining bore nit-picks on something no one else will notice. But in fact, since I can’t remember which book it was and I had two on the go at the time, one by a female author and one by a male author, it may not technically be mansplaining at all. And if I am indeed, briefly, nit-picking, that’s not my purpose here.
 
You see, I am British, with a dash of South African and German, so obviously I wouldn’t want the ‘ruddy Yanks’ to get credit for the cheap-and-dirty submachine gun we bashed out for troops and resistance fighters alike during the war (nor, I gather, would they want it).

Also, being British, I dread the embarrassment of being seen to get something wrong – or even the embarrassment of just imagining the embarrassment of being seen.

But as I might have mentioned, I am British (more or less) and as such I don't have the option to teach myself by shooting off military weapons at the range. Air rifles and shotguns, that’s our limit here (although my South African roots have enabled me to get shot at by more exotic firearms, so there is that…)
 
So no, I'm not pontificating. What this is is an expression of sympathy with authors of action sequences who can’t quite get their heads around the weapons involved – for I am one of you!
 
Here’s an example. When I wrote my early drafts of The Borodino Sacrifice, in which my male MC snatches a Sten away from my female MC in Chapter One, I had her bring the gun to bear on him and him think thus:
 
…there should have been a side-loading magazine and it looked like this one had come off in the crash. (He) didn’t think she’d be fool enough to drive around with the gun cocked: these knocked-out British weapons had no safeties to speak of.
 
Sounds OK, right (if a bit derivative maybe)? Establishes his proficiency with all things military (we’ve only just met him, after all) and makes me sound like I really know my stuff.
 
Except I don’t. Because the thing I’d picked up from the likes of the Bond books and was trying to get across – that guns can still have a round in the chamber, even if the magazine is out – applies to certain guns, like 007’s semi-automatic pistols, but not to simple blowback submachine guns like the Sten. And, thankfully, I doubted myself enough to check.
 
A-ha! Wikipedia told me that the Sten 'fires from an open bolt'. But what did that even mean? I couldn’t get my head around it. We may have played WWII soldiers with Tommy-guns as kids – as I riffed off in my still-to-be-completed novella 76 – but none of those gloomy neighbours who’d done it for real stopped and showed us how they worked, and nor did any of the war films, not really.
 
So I had to dig deeper, and I discovered the world of YouTube firearms content, which includes all the wannabe Navy Seals, as you can imagine, but also a few responsible channels run by dedicated history and engineering experts. From whom I found out about guns like these: how unlike ‘closed bolt’ firearms that are cocked and locked with the bolt forward and a round in the chamber, when you cock the Sten by pulling back the bolt like Virginia here and then you pull the trigger, the bolt comes forward, strips a fresh round out of the magazine, slams it into the breech and fires it all in one go (and so on, and on).

So the finished draft just has to say:
 
…but its distinctive side-loading magazine was missing. He snatched it from her.
 
…which unfortunately doesn’t make it sound like he or I know anything clever about the weapon, but is more accurate and plausible than what I had before. (And shorter. Hooray!)
 
From then on, there was no stopping me correcting myself. Mercifully, writing about the immediate postwar period, I didn’t need to describe any characters thumbing back the hammer on a Glock or clicking off its safety catch (neither of which it has), but I was able to steer clear of other notorious pitfalls such as the ‘smell of cordite’ (keep that for my Boer War period epic…) or a revolver with a silencer…
 
And that’s really all I wanted. To avoid making a fool of myself. Not to give characters who've just picked up a gun an unlikely knowledge of that gun, and definitely not to info-dump gun porn on the reader by having a character think that an MG-34 is firing 7.92×57mm Mauser... but rather to get it right that in this period he’d probably (and wrongly) identify the machine gun as a ‘Spandau’ and not an MG-34 at all.
 
But here’s the thing. Along the way, I started caring about the more egregious errors I encountered, because they reflected how a lack of knowledge (or an acceptance of TV cliches) can influence your narrative detrimentally. An example would be the habit of interchanging rifles and submachine guns based purely on the coolness factor, without stopping to think that one is designed to hit something far away, sometimes even further away than you can see with the naked eye, and the other’s basically for pistol range only – Lost and Walking Dead fans take note! In a similar vein, on a subject I know even less about, I've heard that archers get furious with Legolas et al for drawing their bows and then keeping them drawn to threaten people or make long speeches, as though they were handguns and not weapons based on completely different and very physically demanding physics…
 
Plus I started seeing how choosing to feature more appropriate, interesting or, yes, forgotten weapons instead of the obvious ones had the potential to enrich the story – in exactly the same way as one might avoid overworked settings or character traits to make them more distinctive. So by the time I got on to Book Two, I was letting Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons and Jonathan Ferguson from the Royal Armouries point me towards unusual things like the De Lisle silenced carbine, which I was able to see for myself on a visit to the latter in Leeds (well worth it!). And understanding the capabilities, limitations and availability of that weapon helped shape the story itself.
 
So, not a gripe. Just a bit of well-meant advice, from someone who’s learning from his mistakes. Double-check the stuff you kind-of-know you’re not too sure of.  And please let me know what things I'm still getting embarrassingly wrong, won't you?
 
And in the meantime… Oi, Yanks! Hands off our Sten guns! (Seriously, I now know they’re horrible to hold!)
 
P.S. – I’ve just realised that much of the above may be largely irrelevant if you’re a gamer, playing those games. But I don’t. My namesake Trevor is quite enough for me!

And seriously, I know full well that neither YouTube, gaming – nor escapist action thrillers – can give you an accurate impression of what it's like to use one of these weapons in the flesh or, God forbid, to have it used on you. But that doesn't mean that as creators we shouldn't try to get closer, does it?


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THE BORODINO SACRIFICE, the first book in my CHASING MERCURY series, is now available on Amazon here.